Why I’m the worst mom ever

…or, why we now own a remote control WALL-E robot.

So R’s sixth birthday was on the 26th of June. Sixth. I have a six-year-old. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that idea…

A few days before his birthday we got the card in the mail. The one from Geoffrey, the Toys-R-Us giraffe. The one that comes with a three dollar gift card. When K got his birthday card and gift card, we went to TRU and bought…well, a three dollar item. (actually a $2.99 item & a pack of gummy worms because you had to spend three dollars in order to use the card. Seriously.) I brought R in on his birthday fully intending to do the same.

We wander the aisles of the toy store, looking at this, looking at that, me rejecting item after item due to price or other concerns (nothing based on a show or movie they can’t watch, nothing that encourages fighting, nothing that is so babyish he will soon lose all interest in it.)

Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware that the choices of items you can get in TRU for three dollars or less is miniscule, and not all that interesting. A couple of matchbox cars, maybe some sidewalk chalk or bubbles, very little else…) I was prepared to drop a few more dollars on top of the gift card for something he would enjoy.

To the father walking by with his little one and laughing at me as I called them out of the power wheels aisle, saying to them “Guys come here, because I know you are going to ask for every single one of those cars, and you know I am going to say no every single time.” I know you were laughing because you’ve been there, done that. No hard feelings, really!

To the parents by the action figures who laughed at me when I sighed and said “No, you can’t have the incredible hulk bashing hands, because I’ve already told you three hundred times today that you can’t have anything with fighting.” I’m sure you’ve had the kind of days we have, where they are just at each others throats all day and I’m at the end of my wits thinking of what to do to diffuse the whole situation. (Those days have, thankfully, really decreased in frequency since I stopped letting them watch Code Lyoko and Ben 10, and I have to thank N for standing by me with this even though he disagrees with my policy and really wants to let them watch those again.)

The laughs were sympathetic, we’ve been right there with you types of laughs. I know they were. Right about then is when I called N and whined “Please, save me. I’m in TRU with the boys trying to spend R’s gift card, and everything here is expensive or violent or babyish, or all three combined, and I don’t know what to do.” N replied by telling me we didn’t really need to spend the gift card today. Um, yes we do, because we are here in the store, he has the card in his pocket, he’s holding a happy birthday from Geoffrey balloon, wearing a crown on his head, and has been wished a happy birthday over the loudspeaker and by half the staff of the store. There is no way we can walk out of this store empty handed now.

And N saved me. He reminded me that R received some birthday money from his great-grandparents, who are the awesome.

We continued to wander the aisles, I continued to say no to R’s increasingly half-hearted “can I get this?” requests…and then suddenly it happens. He sees WALL-E sitting there on the shelf, arms outstretched in his box. “MOM!” I hear. Is that actual excitement in his voice? “Look at THIS! It’s WALL-E!” K is actually jumping up and down from excitement too. (or maybe he just had to pee…) “Look, R, look, Mom..it has a remote control!” R is looking it over. There is actual happiness in his eyes (as opposed to just wanting to get something because his friend has one, like the Geotrax he had been looking at). He doesn’t know yet that he will be going to see WALL-E on Saturday as a birthday gift from his grandparents…but I do. He’s been seeing commercials for months on the Disney Channel. He likes WALL-E. He really, really likes him. I have some reservations…Roboraptor was a big hit at Christmas but has been hanging out in the playroom largely unused for some months now. But those brown six-year-old eyes are looking at me. And those little robot eyes are looking at me. R reaches through the hole in the plastic and pushes a button. “WwwwaaaAAAAAlleeeeee” And I see the box where it says “ages 6 and up”. I’m tired of saying “no” to everything.

And so I cave.

And WALL-E came home with us.

So K got a little pack of plastic bathtub boats for his birthday, and R got a remote-control robot. Nah, there’s no future therapy going on for that one…I’m sure.

And when we got home, Roboraptor even came out to play with WALL-E.  He’s a popular little guy.

Damage

Kids break things.  Apparently this is especially true of the male type kids.  I know this.  But it still pisses me off when the things they manage to break are things that have some sentimental value to me…and it REALLY pisses me off when they do it three times in two days.

God help the next toy I catch one of them throwing in the house.

Dreams vs. Reality

At the MOMS Club meeting this morning, T gave a beautiful presentation about the company she works for, Happy Baby, which has a line of all-organic uber-healthy baby foods.

After the meeting I picked the boys up from school & came home and its lunchtime.

Our lunch?

K is eating dry Cocoa Bumpers cereal and R and I are having Ramen.

Sigh.

How did I get here from there?

On a rainy day I think too much. When I have a glass of soda in the evening, and can’t sleep as a result, I think too much. And my friend Kelly’s post touching on how hard she found it when her kids were infants is what I’ve been thinking about.

I am just the opposite from Kelly. The infant days were easy for me. The decisions were simple. The consequences of a wrong decision were not so dire. Lack of sleep didn’t bother me none — I’ve always gotten by with not-enough-sleep, and to be completely honest N was as helpful and involved a dad as I could have ever wished for. He was running his own business, and he was here. All the time. Taking breaks, helping out, keeping me from feeling overwhelmed. Keeping me from ever needing to do it all, totally alone. From the moment they let us leave the hospital (and I just could.not.believe that they were letting us walk out of there with this perfect, beautiful, helpless baby — surely they know that I’ve never done this before. They’re going to stop us any second, right? Right? Wrong. No one chased us down as we left saying “Wait! There’s been a mistake! You can’t take him home with you!” Nope. They checked that we had a carseat installed and knew how to use it, they packed up our free diaper bag and formula samples, and sent the three of us on our merry way.

But then we got home, and settled in, and things weren’t so bad. Feeding the baby – breast or formula? Start out with breast, start supplementing with formula when it became necessary. Either way, the baby was fed. When to start solids? The pediatrician wanted R to start at 4 months because he was underweight. We followed the professional advice. Peas or carrots? Whatever. There was nothing life-altering in the decisions I had to make. K came along and they let us take him home, too. As R got older, the choices started to get harder, but not much. How old to start preschool? Which preschool to choose? Which class?

Last year came the first of the potentially life-altering decisions. Should we start him in Kindergarten or hold him out an extra year. I agonized over the right thing to do. N and I spoke to his teachers, discussed it with each other, consulted friends. In the end we decided to wait, and seeing the improvement he made this year has confirmed to us that we did the right thing. But this will follow him for his entire school career. He’s starting at six when the norm is still five. He’ll be older when he graduates high school. What if he resents us for that, later? We just hope for the best.

When the boys were infants, I knew the right things to do. Now, as they get older, I’m finding myself less and less sure. I’m finding myself yelling and yelling and uselessly yelling the same things over and over and over again, a broken record going “clean your toys up, get dressed, no you can’t watch TV right now, no you can’t bring that toy to school, WOULD YOU PLEASE GET DRESSED ALREADY I TOLD YOU TWENTY MINUTES AGO AND NOW YOU ARE GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL!!!!” I’m stuck in this cycle of telling and yelling and they don’t hear a thing I say anymore. And even as I yell I know in some part of my mind that it is ineffective, that I am out of control, and worst of all I am hearing my mother’s voice in mine and HATING it.

N tells me to get down with them and make cleaning up fun. He has a knack for knowing what to say so they listen, for making it a game to clean up, for keeping his cool and keeping them interested, for being the fun one. Me? Not so much. I think I could build a mommy-bot, a robot that looks just like me and program phrases into it like “no running in the house” and “don’t climb on the furniture” and “go use the potty”, and set them to repeat at intervals and they wouldn’t notice the difference. I’m not really a get-down-and-play kind of person, most of the time. I’ll play games with them, but one or two rounds and I’m done. Their imaginations leave me confused and exhausted. They become superheroes with strange and incomprehensible powers, or ninjas, or exotic animals and they playact games with rules that leave me mystified, dumbly slipping into my mantra of “no fighting with each other”.  There’s another phrase to program into my mommy-bot.

I’m not quite sure when I forgot how to behave with my children.  Was it in the bout of depression that started around the time of my pregnancy with K? Was it when I went back to work full time for a year? I guess it was a gradual thing, exacerbated by both of those situations.

But it hurts to be out as a family and all both of them want is Daddy. I try to hold their hands and all they want is to break away from me and run to him.  The worst of it all, is I don’t blame them.  I wouldn’t want to hang out with me either.  I’m not the fun one.  I used to be fun…I really did.  I need to relearn fun-ness, because I miss laughing with my little boys.

The lies we tell our children (or, I think I am going to Hell for this one)

Today we went to a MOMS Club craft day & lunch at our friends’ house.  We made dream catchers, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  As I was working with K on his, we slipped one of the beads on, I asked him if he liked where it was, and he looked at me and said “Yeah, can I go now?”

I explained to R, who suffers from terrible nightmares (possibly night terrors from what I understand of the difference) that the dream catchers were believed to trap the bad dreams in their webs and let only the good dreams through.  He was excited about this, and we finished his dream catcher, and he went off to play.  A little while later we left.  Left the dream catchers, too.  R hasn’t gone to sleep yet and just asked for his.  I told him we’d left it behind, and he was pretty upset.  I told him (thinking fast) that because he had made it today, it would still work, even though it’s not here.  Tomorrow will be a frantic phone call to E in the hopes that she didn’t already toss it out.  ANYTHING that helps put him in a positive frame of mind before going to sleep has got to be a good thing.

I love my children, I love my children, I love my children, I love my children…

Maybe if I keep repeating that I’ll remember it…

Seriously.

Nah, it’s not really THAT bad. One of them (And I’m pretty sure I know which one) put crayons into his pocket. Four of them. Then took off his clothes and put them in the hamper. Which I emptied into the washer, and then switched into the dryer.

Argh!!!

So now we have a pretty dryer. Seriously — it’s like a nice watercolor effect on the (formerly) white enamel.

And a ruined load of laundry. At least N will get some new socks out of the debacle.

For your viewing pleasure…

Dryer interior:

N’s socks:

K’s new and improved tie-dye shirt (and you thought it couldn’t get any more colorful!)

And lastly, the remains of the offending crayons. I think I know which Thing was responsible for this particular goof because the crayons are yellow, blue, red, and purple. Wiggles colors. Huh. I wonder whose those are??? That concert is costing us more money by the minute…

A Memorial Day to, well, remember…

So tonight was our first ever trip to the ER with one of the boys.

They were playing in a sprinkler at the grandparents’ house and K hit his head on the sprinkler and gashed open his forehead. About an inch long and all the way down. One second he was playing and all was fine and fun, the next he is crying and turned around and was COVERED in blood. I have NEVER seen so much blood in my life. Not even the time he bit through his tongue came close. Head to toe. Even granting that he was wet and that makes it look worse…he was gushing. So we got some towels on the wound, got him in the car and off to the hospital. He was upset and scared but being SO brave.

R stayed at the grandparents, and we get to the hospital, and I am super impressed with EVERYONE there, by the way. I’ll be sending a letter. At the admissions desk the girl offered him a lollipop, he took it, and when she asked him if he wanted to give her the wrapper to throw out he says “No thank you, I know how to do that” and gets out of N’s lap and goes to the trash can to throw out the wrapper. We finish admissions and end up in the room with Nurse Juanita. She keeps him calm, N was explaining to him what was going to happen and she’s going along with it, showing K the gloves as she’s putting them on, explaining everything she’s doing, etc. Doctor K. was the same way. K kept looking at him and asking him about the tools he was using and what he was doing. Doctor K. answered all of his questions. N was holding K’s hands down (I couldn’t) and kept making faces and being silly. K is laying there getting stitches in his head and laughing at his Daddy being goofy. The only times it was bad was when he was getting the Novocaine injection and then a little bit in the very last stitch. He ended up with 3 stitches in the muscle layer and 6 on the surface.

Weird side note — my father is a tool and dye maker, and he BUILT the machines that make the needles used for stitches. I wanted to say something about that to K…but I’m not ready to open that can of worms with them just yet. We haven’t figured out yet how to explain the situation with my family. It’s so hard to be estranged like this. But that situation was just plain unhealthy.

An hour after the initial accident, we were finished at the hospital and on our way back to Mom & J’s house for dinner. I am VERY impressed with the hospital staff, I’ve heard so many emergency room horror stories but this was definitely not one of them. And K seems to be just fine.

Here are pics of Kieran & his stitches:

Weekend from Hell

So it’s been more like the week from Hell. Our dishwasher broke. Our washing machine broke. Our garbage disposal broke. The inspection on our car from September is not valid, because the dumbass car repair people did not tell us that we needed to bring the car back in to get the emission test redone after they replaced the cap to the gas tank. N had to work both nights of the weekend (and the days) to get a big project done so I barely saw him all weekend.

But, worst of all, was what happened with R and the fish.

Where to start with this one? N was up in the attic working. At some point in the night K woke up, came in, and got into bed with me. R did the same a short time later. Not a big deal, except that two kids in bed with me means I’m getting no sleep. One’s kicking me, one’s pulling my hair (none of it is intentional, just happening) I FINALLY drift off sometime in the wee hours. I was exhausted — this is important — I was EXHAUSTED!!!

So R wakes up at some point after I crash. And gets up, and goes downstairs. Where he sees the aquarium and thinks, hey, I’ll feed the fish. He dumps the whole can of fish food into the aquarium. Then he decides in his little 4-year-old brain that it would be fun to go fishing. Do you see where this is going? He goes fishing for our guppies. Catches them too. All 4 of them. He carries them across the living room and they eventually wind up on the floor next to the front door (we haven’t quite figured this part out). He apparently now realizes that they need water to survive, and spends the next we don’t know how long carting water from the aquarium to where the fish are now located in the fish food can, and pouring it onto the fish. Right around now, N comes down and catches him. I’m sleeping, and oddly enough, actually DREAMING about the fish. Weird, huh? So N yells at R, R cries, and this wakes me up. I come down and find the chaos. We haven’t realized at this point that he has actually removed fish from the aquarium – we think he’s just pouring water out for some reason. Moments later I realize that the guppies are missing. We actually found, and saved, three of them. One vanished completely, we have no idea where it could have ended up. Poor fishy .

I went into manic tank-cleaning mode, and N and R had a little chat about what exactly R had done. The gem from this conversation as reported to me later by N? R asking him if God was going to come down from heaven for the fish tha died. Then saying “But if God comes out of heaven, will everyone die?” N set him straight on everything.

The tank is as clean as I could get it — the water is cloudy but seems to be clearing up some. The three remaining guppies seem to be doing okay and the rest of the fish seem just fine.

So then on to today. Monday morning. R has a dentist appointment – they were filling the first 2 of his 6 cavities today. N has a HUGE project due before lunch. So I had to take off work for the AM in order to get R to his appointment. He did very well in with the dentist but he was VERY emotional coming off the anesthesia. He burst into tears all morning about everything from not being able to play a video game to having to eat soft food for lunch. I made him scrambled eggs and gave him a cup of Wawa eggnog (He’s his father’s son, they both adore the stuff) and he felt much better. Now we need to go through this two more times for the rest of his cavities.